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Having a Dam Good Time in Amsterdam

Leaving the open and unrestricted speed lanes behind us (seriously Netherlands, 120 km/h? We’re driving German-engineered cars, not Power Wheels), Team Germany headed north for the weekend to get our passports stamped in another country.

What’s that? You don’t get your passport stamped when you come in by car?!?

Well, whatever, we went to the Netherlands and we have the pictures to prove it.

Upon emerging from the depths of the Amsterdam Metro system (side note: the city-wide janitorial staff for the Metro system is currently on strike. Every train and station looked like the spaceport in The Fifth Element [credit Tim Kiss for that amazing reference] and we weren’t going to be the scabs to start cleaning up the place), we realized that we sorely lacked the appropriate transportation needed to get around the city.

Boats (while not conflicting with traffic, they are the object of desire of every pedestrian in the city)

Mopeds

Cars

Pigeons

People with walking sticks

People biking with a giant bucket in the front of their bike to carry other people who were too lazy to bike (shocker: Natalie wanted to rent one of these)

Regular people walking

In front of my very own eyes, a guy was clipped by a biker and started bleeding from his arm right in the middle of the street. This was treated by the locals as a regular occurrence.

Speaking about unusual lacerations to the body, Friday night’s events included a stop over at the Vincent van Gogh museum, which doubles as a music venue on Friday evenings for aspiring DJs and contemporary jazz bands. @JoeyClarktheIII would have uttered the phrase “the jams” a record number of times.

Friday Night Lights at the Van Gogh Museum

Later on, we took to the streets to continue our Street Dance Party: International Tour Edition (copyright 2014). Knowing that we would be calling Saturday an early night as we needed to hit the road first thing on Sunday, we committed to Friday being a big night and subsequently closed down the Amsterdam bar scene. Hamburg trained us well.

Saturday was filled with enjoying quite possibly the nicest day in human history. We kicked off the morning with a boat ride from our hotel through the heart of Amsterdam’s canal system, checking out the best of the best houseboats Amsterdam had to offer. While this was a great way to experience the entire city by day, we were suffering from serious FOMO once we realized that you could rent private boats and drive them yourselves. Unfortunately for us, everything was already booked for the day. I’ll regret not driving around a boat for the afternoon and having my team refer to me as “Captain” until the day I die.

Over the course of the day, we worked through one of the biggest open-air markets in the world, took a nap in a beautiful park, stumbled upon the Royal Palace, visited Anne Frank’s house, and caught the Netherlands soccer (excuse me, football) game with a wild crowd of spectators. Oh, and we got a bunch of cool pictures too. Check ‘em out.

Man I really mailed in the end of this post. Until next time Amsterdam…